Traditionally, applications have used portions of local memory on a host server for data caching. With this type of hosted cache solution, only a part of the local memory may be used as the cache because that memory is also consumed by the operating system and other processes running on the server. A hosted caching solution can be difficult to use because the user is usually responsible for installation and configuration of the applications and cache in addition to ongoing management and maintenance of the system.
Additionally, with a hosted cache, the application scale is limited by the capacity of the compute instance hosting the cache. To scale-up the cache, the user must manually add and prepare additional instances. Additionally, there is no guaranteed uptime for the hosted cache. Instead, the user is responsible for maintaining the operating status of the cache.